Arvind Mahankali, 13, from Bayside Hills, N.Y., spelled two more words correctly than Pranav Sivakumar from Barrington, Ill., Thursday night at the National Harbor to become the first male winner of the Scripps National Spelling Bee since 2008, ESPN showed.
“I think that the German curse has become a German blessing,” he told an ESPN reporter just before he received the trophy, referring to two of his previous three appearances in the final round where he misspelled a word of German origin. But not this time.
He later said he would put the spelling studies aside for the moment and focus on physics.
The Scripps National Spelling Bee used a new format in the championship round for the first time this year. Previously, it could go on forever if nobody misspelled a word on the final list. This year, however, a 25-word list was used in the championship round as soon as the field was narrowed down to three. If two or three spellers remained after the list was exhausted, those spellers would have been named co-champions.
The 281-speller field at the national finals included 178 students from traditional public schools (63.4%), 54 from private schools (19.2%), 15 from parochial schools (5.3%), 25 who are home schooled (8.9%), and nine who attend charter schools (3.2%). There were 147 girls and 134 boys. Amber Heard, an eighth grader who came in fourth this year, was the last girl on stage.
The final words
Pranav spelled “avellaneous,” but Sriram Hathwar misspelled “ptyalagogue” to become the third-place finisher this year. Then Arvind spelled “crapaud,” Pranav spelled “haupia,” and Arvind “kaumographer.”
Then, the bell rang to indicate Pranav had misspelled “cyanophycean,” presumably an alga, which is not on dictionary.com. How can we trust the Internet anymore? The word he spelled, “cyanophycin,” except for, I believe, the addition of an ‘e’ before the ‘i,’ is also related to biology, meaning an amino acid polymer composed of an aspartic acid backbone and arginine side groups. Anyway, he failed to spell the word he was given and was tentatively eliminated.
Arvind would have to spell two words to become the single champion, and he correctly spelled “tokonoma” and “knaidel,” a Yiddish-derived noun meaning a dumpling, to do just that. This year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee is in the books.
The New York Daily News sponsored Arvind, and Pranav was sponsored by the Lake County Regional Office of Education in Grayslake.